Business and council leaders from the North East have spoken of the need to collaborate with the rest of the North to put the region on a global map.

Providing better links between Northern cities has emerged as one of the key themes at the Northern Powerhouse conference in Manchester today, with Newcastle City Council leader Pat Ritchie taking up that message.

She said: “Newcastle is at the northern end of the Northern Powerhouse so for the North East, we’re not just thinking about London but also we’re bordering a very powerful Scotland, which has significant powers around skills and inward investment, a lot of the things we want to see.

“For Newcastle we want to be able to collaborate with other cities in the North to provide a counter balance to Scotland. There are some things we should be doing at a Northern level, playing to our global strengths and the agglomeration of the Northern economy.

“We want to make this somewhere that has international competitiveness and that offers long careers for our young people in the same way that London does.”

Mrs Ritchie was speaking on a panel that also included council chief executives from Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield and Liverpool, who said they were competing less to attract new employers and instead seeing how they could work together for the benefit of all their areas.

She said: “If Nissan grows in Sunderland, it’s good for Newcastle and the rest of the North because we’re home to a global company.

The theme of collaboration between cities was taken up later at the conference by Sarah Green, the CBI’s director of regions and nations, who was previously the organisation’s regional director in the North East.

In an interview with BBC presenter John Humphreys, she said that the CBI backed devolution to Northern regions, but only if it was about providing economic growth.

She said: “Everything needs to be focussed on the outcome of economic growth. The work that’s being done in transport will drive economic growth in the North.

“What you get when you start to connect cities in the North is that it does mean something on a global level. This isn’t about Newcastle against Sunderland, we need to look outwards and be globally competitive.”